The Guilt Project by Vanessa Place : Why this book matters

In this Nancy Grace culture, in which suspects are all guilty until proven worthy of being considered innocent (usually by producing the requisite number of tears or volunteering to be hooked up to electrodes for a lie detector test, or forgoing the representation of a good attorney, despite being entitled to said representation), it is rare to find a discussion about crime & justice that avoids the strict dichotomy of “good vs. evil” or “tough-on-crime vs. criminal coddling.” This is especially true when it comes to sex offenders: legislators are for the children or against them; against the sex offenders or coddling them.  While the emotions driving these sentiments are certainly understandable, given the heinousness of sex crimes and the horrors that victims face, they are not necessarily healthy for public policy – especially where it concerns basic constitutional protections.  This is why Vanessa Place’s book,The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law is so important. It asks questions – legal, cultural, ethical, and moral – that heretofore have been swept under the rug. Even if one disagrees vigorously (and righteously) with all of Place’s contentions, questions, criticisms, and legal interpretations, the point is to have the conversation.

Place, an appellate criminal defense attorney who specializes in sex offenders and sexually violent predators, never pretends that the great majority of her clients are innocent (legally or factually, although some may be the latter), or that they are “good men.”  In fact, she refers to them as the “very bad men” that many Americans fear. “Most of my clients,” she writes, “are factually guilty by virtue of their acts; all are legally guilty by virtue of their convictions.  They are the very bad men, those who trigger the question, ‘How can you defend people like that, knowing that they’re guilty?’” But for Place, the question is larger than that.  For in this Nancy Grace and Dateline culture, where either-or fallacies are tossed around for entertainment and “very bad men” are no longer considered human, something very important is at stake: “our own humanity.” In a culture where the innocence of the victim is the yardstick for the evil of the perpetrator, we risk losing our “mercy”:

At heart, mercy is simply the steady responsibility to safeguard the humanity of all, including those we hate. There will always be people guilty of great evil.  But evil is an act, not a cultural metaphor, not a social backdrop, and not entertainment.  As a people, we have to resist the temptation to make our morality contingent on anybody’s innocence.  You might hate my clients, and you might be right.  My clients routinely disprove God.  But we can’t use them to undo our own humanity.

And so with “our own humanity” at stake, Place approaches everything from the reliability of DNA evidence to involuntary commitments for sex offenders to intoxication and legal consent with a critical eye, posing questions readers will never see on cable news (scratch that: they might see them uttered by one of the talking heads on the Brady Bunch-style grid, but they will be quickly and summarily squashed by the host).

I do not interpret this to mean that Americans need to coddle sex offenders, or feel sorry for them, or care for them more than for victims, or any of those false dichotomies.  This is not an invitation (or exhortation) to throw a pity party.  Rather, this is about placing larger questions of humanity above fear and hate – or to ground it to something more concrete, to care about the integrity of America’s ideals so much that we are willing to uphold them even when it disgusts us to do so.

Place herself is not afraid to divulge (or confess) her own complicated feelings at times; nor is she afraid to “play prosecution” and consider the other side.  In fact, reading her book at times feels like a wrestling match of sorts: an adversarial trial in which the system itself is charged with breaking its own ideals. Place is not afraid to say when the state is right, or when the state is acting on good principles or ideals but needs to change its tactics.  This is not an “us vs. them” or “defense attorney vs. evil, oppressive state” sort of book.  That is what makes it such a remarkable and important addition to the discourse.  That is why this book matters.

In future posts, I will respond to issues The Guilt Project raises for me.

gratitude

Recently, when the news broke that Brooke Wilberger’s remains had finally been located, I saw a short video clip of Brooke’s mother expressing gratitude – in part, to her daughter’s killer for revealing to police where the body could be found.  Even if he provided this information as part of his plea agreement to avoid the death penalty, it still meant Brooke could finally be returned to her family.

I remember this case well.  Brooke went missing when I still lived in Oregon, so her photograph featured prominently on the newspaper front pages.  That was five years ago – a long time to wait for a daughter’s remains to receive a proper burial, to know the full story of her final moments, to have a setting in which to place them.  I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to finally know where Brooke was – a relief, perhaps. While some reacted with shock that Brooke’s mother could feel anything close to gratitude, I partly understand what she means – not because I can even begin to know her pain, but because I know what it means to want answers.  To need answers, however horrifying or ugly, in order to bury remains.  

This past weekend marked the one-year anniversary of my oldest brother’s death, and well-meaning acquaintances and online friends reassure me that the hardest part is over now, that the one-year anniversary is the worst, that the questions will all diminish and fade, that I will never again grieve so hard, that I can heal now. But the shadows have not been lit, and the questions feel more urgent every day. I want my brother to lead me to the scene of the crime, so to speak, where it all went wrong, where it became possible to do what he was accused of doing, where something snapped. I need him to lead me there, to show me what happened, to admit to it, or explain it, or enter a plea. 

Lately, I have been considering hypnosis.  I want to dig up long-buried memories and yank them out by the root, so I can examine them more closely, ask questions that my family never thought to ask, find out for myself. I want to recover the memories I know I lost, to understand images such as: __________.

If I could have asked my brother while he was still alive, and if he would have answered, I would have felt gratitude.  And even though he is no longer here to answer me, if something in my memories of him reveals the answers, I will feel it, too.  I want to. 

re-victimization

In a story published today by CBS, one of Phillip Garrido’s printing business clients, Cheyvonne Molino, asks that Jaycee Dugard - the kidnap victim held for 18 years by Garrido - “tell the truth” about her years as a hostage.  According to Molino, Dugard did not sleep in a tent, despite widespread media reports about a makeshift shelter-prison in Garrido’s backyard.

However, sleeping arrangements are not really the issue in this case. Certainly, we all recognize the barbarity of forcing someone to live in a backyard tent without access to healthcare, proper sanitation, or social interaction, but even if we take the tent-prison out of the picture, this is still one horrific story. An eleven-year-old girl was snatched on her way to school, taken against her will to a city over two-hundred miles away, raped on more than one occasion (at least twice, as evidenced by Jaycee’s two children, one of which would have been conceived when she was just fourteen), and forced to give birth without access to medical care or social support of any kind. Whether she lived in a tent or the house, Jaycee Dugard has been violated in every possible way.

And frankly, Jaycee has no obligation to tell the public anything at all.  It will be hard enough to provide testimony for trial.  

One wonders what possible motivation Molino has for demanding such a concession from Dugard. The answer seems to be simple self-preservation: Police have searched Molino’s property, looking for evidence of child pornography in connection with the Garrido case. Perhaps Molino seeks to undermine Dugard’s credibility in a bid to win sympathy or even cover her own connections with the case. If so, the strategy has failed. All Molino has succeeded in doing is calling attention to herself – and not in a positive light. At best, she seems to lack sympathy for Dugard; at worst, she sounds complicit.  After all, when bystanders demand “concessions” from victims – particularly victims of sex offenses – they may as well pour battery acid into their emotional wounds. It re-victimizes and re-traumatizes survivors all over again. 

Worse, though, is that CBS sees it as appropriate to air such demands. This makes the network complicit as well – and not only in re-traumatizing Dugard, but also in spreading cultural myths about survivors of molestation and abuse, and how the trauma really is not “as bad” as it is portrayed. 

let this be a warning

A close friend asked me the other day whether I worry about posting so much personal writing online – or publishing any writing at all, really.  ”You make yourself a target,” she said. “There are sick people out there who can track you down.”

The truth is, I do worry, but for me, that is not a reason to quit; on the contrary, it is a reason to keep going.

Back when I wrote columns for a small local newspaper, people recognized me everywhere I went.  They approached me in coffee shops, at the grocery store, on the sidewalk, and even in the bathroom.  They invited me to lunch, asked personal questions, stepped into my personal space, and occasionally hugged me.  Sometimes, they blocked my path on the sidewalk, and I never knew whether that was intentional. 

Then there were the letters.  They arrived addressed to me personally, not to the newspaper. One man described his knife collection in alarming detail, inviting me over to “view” it.  Another told me he wanted to pry open my mouth, wire my jaw wide open, and dump alcohol down my throat – by the gallon. 

I never reported the letters to police, although I double-checked my door locks at night. 

None of the men writing columns for the same newspaper received letters of this sort, and so while I felt threatened, I also felt an obligation to keep going. I would not let the letter writers (men, all of them) silence me.  The irony here was that in order to start a writing career, I had to put myself out there, and yet, male editors, friends, and acquaintances constantly expressed “concern” that it was not safe for me to publish. Women writers, apparently, were not allowed on the playground. They should stick to journals and diaries, or at the very least, write about “fluffy” subjects and get a nice pen name (and maybe even a phony profile photo).  

My blogs feel different – not any less risky, but perhaps a bit more distant.  Maybe because they aren’t printed in a local paper, they tend to attract readers from far-flung locations, so any “threats”  seem less plausible. Most readers would never run into me at the grocery store or on the sidewalk (or at least, probably not know if they did). Then again, I lived for several years under near-constant threat from an online stalker who filled my inbox with self-righteous rants about how I “shouldn’t” write about certain things. Distance or no distance, I felt violated. So it can happen with my blogs, too.

When it comes down to it, people who ask women to stop writing (for their own safety, for their own protection) ask them to become the very thing most feared: missing persons. They demand women disappear from the public discourse in the hopes that they will never literally go missing. Women, meanwhile, are expected to hop on this hamster wheel logic and run without ever actually going anywhere.

When you spend a lot of time reading about missing people, as I do, you know that missing persons come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders (and I am not limiting that term to just male or female).  They disappear from parking lots, crashed cars, sidewalks, driveways, and even their own beds. Sometimes, they run away.  Sometimes, they commit suicide.  Other times, the worst possible violence wipes them from this earth. And then there are kids sold into slavery of all forms. The list is endless.

The media, however, obsesses almost exclusively over missing women – white women in particular. Media critics rightly charge that white damsels dominate the airwaves because a white-dominated, racist media is more interested in white victims. While this is definitely true, it does not necessarily explain the obsession with female victims. Something else may be at work at the same time – an undercurrent of sexism so deep it expresses itself as expectation: expectation that women will go missing; expectation that they will lock themselves away from the terrifying world and keep quiet. When the media insists on showing woman after woman who simply vanishes, it begins to feel like that is what women do when they dare go out into the world: they vanish. The news becomes a control mechanism, even if not intended as such. Let this be a warning swims, jaws-like, beneath the surface.

Case in point: Why didn’t the case of missing prosecutor Ray Gricar attract more attention?  After all, he was a prominent member of his community, and he simply vanished into thin air. His image should have been flashed nightly on all the major news programs, but it wasn’t. Visit any cold cases or missing persons site, and it becomes obvious that men not only can be victims, but many are.  And yet, in our culture the very notion of a missing man strikes even a violence-drenched media as strange.  Men are not victims; women are.   We (meaning, we as a culture) are comfortable with the idea that women are always in danger, always potential victims, always in need of rescue.   And so the media feeds us precisely that.   

Media coverage a few years ago about some missing Boy Scouts out in the wilderness was a rare exception to the damsel-in-distress syndrome, but like so many exceptions, it served mainly to prove the rule. These boys, after all, went missing out in nature. They were not “victims” so much as brave explorers who headed into rugged terrain and got lost. And, of course, it was not their “fault” for “putting themselves in danger.”  Contrast that with the recent case of a woman kidnapped while out walking on a country road for some exercise.  Her kidnapping has inspired more than a few talking heads to ask, “What was she doing out there, walking?” A woman walking on a paved country road is asking to go missing; Boy Scouts running amok in the wilderness are brave kids exploring their inner “wild man.”

I have also noticed:  When the Boy Scouts went missing, the media kept calling them “missing Boy Scouts,” whereas women are rarely referred to by profession.  You rarely (if ever) hear, “the missing artist …” or “the missing doctor …” in relation to a missing woman.  The one exception is when a missing woman danced in a nude bar or worked as prostitute or model of some kind.  And, of course, if she was a mother. Then the media will make sure to let you know, repeating it over and over. 

And yet, in spite of all this, if women hide from the outside world, they are branded as paranoid, oppressed, unambitious, or even lazy. 

“Why doesn’t she get out there and run? I see she has gained a few pounds …”  

“She spends all that time journaling and the house is a mess.”  

“Can you believe she shut down her blog because of a few threatening emails?” 

That last one is the literary corollary to the old prude-slut trap: If you dare to put your writing out there, you are asking for danger; if you keep your writing to yourself, you are a coward. Or worse.  

So to answer my friend, I have to say: If a strange man’s knife collection could not scare me away, a double-edged sword will never succeed, either. I am not going anywhere.

all that was left

Media coverage of the Jasmine Fiore murder - specifically, that her teeth were ripped out and fingers cut off, so that all that was left to identify her were the serial numbers on her breast implants – reminds me of another case from 2003.

On April 13, 2003, Maria Cruz left her midtown Manhattan apartment, shopped at a department store near West 16th Street, and vanished without a trace until February of the following year, when her body was finally recovered.  She had been stuffed inside a suitcase and sealed inside cement: baggage never meant to be claimed. Serial numbers on her breast implants were all that was left to reveal her identity. 

Later, detectives discovered that on the morning she disappeared, she had an appointment with a Dr. Faiello.  Little did Maria know: In 2002, Dr. Faiello was arrested for practicing medicine without a license.  He pleaded guilty, but he served no time. Shortly thereafter, he opened a medical office in an apartment on West 16th Street in New York – the same street where Maria was last seen. The rest of the story tells itself: a panicked “doctor” who accidentally kills a patient and tries to clean up his mess by hiding the body. 

When I first learned about Maria six years ago, I could not help but think about how her breast implants – stamped with individual serial numbers – were more identifiable than her own skin and bones.  Reporters seemed to find it almost funny, repeating the detail over and over:  “You will not believe how detectives identified this woman.” 

It started to sound like a warning, a cautionary tale for women everywhere. But what was the message?Dare to make your body meet our standards, and this could be you – your implants the big joke on CNN. Dare not to make your body meet our standards, and your body – and there will be a body someday – will never be identified. Your choice. 

After all, the very implants Maria Cruz had purchased to make her body more ideal – which by definition, means less distinct, less individual – had ended up identifying her in the end. They were more individual than her own remains.  

In the case of Jasmine Fiore, I notice a similar obsession with the method of identification, and I find it fascinating, especially in light of recent controversies over the reliability and accuracy of forensic evidence. It would be easy to assume people have mostly a prurient interest in the breast implant details, but six years after the discovery of Maria Cruz, things seem a little different this time.  I cannot help but wonder if something else is going on here, some collective expression of doubt about the meaning of identity when even our fingerprints can be mistaken, and even DNA can be fabricated in a lab. Maybe, just maybe, we realize the cautionary tale is bigger this time, something more than another horror story about – and for – women. 

restorative justice and sex offender registration

The latest issue of The Economist features an article entitled “America’s unjust sex laws,” about the collateral consequences of sex offenses – lifelong offender registration, residence restrictions, high rates of unemployment due to social stigma, harassment from neighbors, and the list goes on. 

I was pleased to see cited in the article recommendations to make sex offender registries private, with citizens gaining access through some kind of moderated process – as opposed to the current state of affairs, where people surf offender databases seeking out “predators” in the immediate vicinity and pulling up their addresses, modus operandi, rap sheets, and even mug shots. Though convictions are listed prominently, with provocative words such as “sodomy” (an example named in The Economist article as well), the registries do not share the facts of the cases behind those convictions – facts that can radically change perceptions of both offense and offender.

Back when I studied Restorative Justice as part of my Criminology program, I wrote a research paper that examined whether and how we could reform sex offender laws – in specific, sex offender registries – to make them restorative as opposed to retributive. Restorative Justice operates on entirely different principles than the adversarial, and some would say, retributive system currently in place in the United States. Rather than seeking to punish people for offenses “against the state,” Restorative Justice seeks to right the wrongs done to individual victims. The focus is not on which laws were broken, who broke them, and how they should be punished; instead, Restorative Justice seeks to identify what harms were done, what needs these harms created, and who is responsible for meeting these needs (Zehr, 2002, p. 21). 

Victims – rather than offenders – are the central focus of Restorative Justice (Zehr, 2002). The idea is to restore victims’ sense of safety and dignity and heal the community, while at the same time treating offenders with dignity and humanity. This can be achieved in many ways, which I will explore in future posts, but one key component is encouraging in offenders a sense of shame for wrong actions – not shame for oneself as a human being. This ideally leads to authentic apology, as well as acceptance of responsibility to right wrongs. 

My concerns about sex offender registries were threefold: 

  1. Collateral consequences, because they are not technically “sentences” (even though they largely function as such), lack the individualization necessary to be humane in application and effect.  Courts cannot take into account the specific facts of an offense – say, that an 18-year-old man had sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend – when assigning offenders to registries.  That 18-year-old man may wind up with his name and face on a registry for life – listed alongside a predatory serial rapist, as if they were morally equivalent.  The public, unable to tell the difference, assumes the two are equally dangerous. 
  2. The aesthetics of most registries encourage the public to repudiate the offender as opposed to the offense, which has profound consequences in terms of both an offender’s ability to reintegrate and rehabilitate, as well as the actual effectiveness of the databases in decreasing recidivism.  
  3. Sex offender registries do precious little to empower citizens. Although their intent is to protect the public, they tend to fan the flames of fear and hate, while at the same time creating a false sense of security.  

One of my solutions was to make sex offender registries private (for law enforcement only), so when I read The Economist article, I was glad to see others thinking in a similar vein.

I also wanted to change their aesthetics—eliminating brightly colored labels such as “predator.”

Finally, I wanted to see more individualization in the cases to which they were applied.  So I was right in line with some of the key concerns expressed in The Economist.  I am glad to see the possibility of a real discussion about this issue, and I hope more coverage in the mainstream media will follow the excellent Economist article. 

What do you think? Can the goals of sex offender registration ever mesh with the goals of restorative justice? Should they?

References

Zehr, Howard. (2002). The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.

sex offender registries and collateral consequences

As mentioned in my first Restorative Justice post, I will be publishing a series of posts focusing on sex offender registries and notification systems, as examined through the lens of Restorative Justice.  These are sections from a research paper I wrote on the subject in 2006.  

Origin of Sex Offender Registries and Notification

Sex offender registries and notification laws originated with the movement toward victim rights and community justice (Presser and Gunnison, 1999). The idea was to enhance the community’s ability to protect itself, while also empowering victims and potential victims through access to previously unavailable information about offenders. As Presser and Gunnison (1999) note, “The sex offender notification movement draws ideologically from a restorative justice ideal, which states that a more just society will be achieved through community problem-solving” (p. 302). With community surveillance of sex offenders, the public would be empowered to prevent further victimization. This movement toward notification and enhanced access to sex offender registries came on the heels of widely publicized cases of sexual assaults by paroled sex offenders.

Notification began in 1989 in Washington State (Presser and Gunnison, 1999, p. 301) and swept through the nation following the murder of Megan Kanka in New Jersey at the hands of a paroled sex offender (Presser and Gunnison, 1999, p. 301). Following her murder, the federal Megan’s Law was passed, which “mandated the public release of information about offenders by the states, in part by relaxing confidentiality restrictions” (Presser and Gunnison, 1999, p. 301).

The registries appear to function more as areas for retributive shame than for community empowerment. Rather than being used to involve the community, the databases seem to function more as lifetime sentences – in other words, collateral consequences – while doing little more than recruit community members to ostracize offenders (Presser and Gunnison 1999, p. 304). The community response to the offender is isolation, stigmatization, harassment, and fear, as opposed to monitoring and reintegration (Tewskbury, 2005). Rather than empower citizens and victims, the registries and notification systems diminish their capacity to feel and actually be safe. This can be attributed, in least in part, to the lack of a clear philosophy to guide the use of the registries – and certainly to a lack of a restorative philosophy in their creation and development. Citizens find precious little information about how to actually use the databases or notification systems, or what their responses should be (Presser and Gunnison, 1999, p. 305).

Sex Offender Registries and Disintegrative Shame: A Life Sentence of Ostracism?

Registries are not officially acknowledged as part of a sentence, since the criminal justice system recognizes only those punishments demanded by the court in response to a conviction or plea as an actual “sentence.” That is, the registries are not a judicial function; they are a civil one, prescribed by civil laws written by legislative bodies that do not actually work in or with the justice system or with victims, offenders or corrections. These civil penalties take effect upon release from prison and are similar to other such collateral civil consequences, such as losing the ability to work in a particular profession, losing licenses, losing the right to vote, or even losing the ability to apply for public housing assistance for food stamps (such as with felony drug offenders). Unlike a prison sentence, these civil consequences cannot be reduced, individualized, or for that matter, addressed at trial. There is no admission of mitigating or aggravating circumstances, despite the fact that these civil consequences amount to lifetime sentences. Some jurisdictions use risk assessments to determine which types of offenders must register, but reassessments are not done at later stages. These sentences essentially add up to lifetime isolation and ostracism. As Tewksbury (2005) writes:

The most common forms of barriers reported by sex offenders are difficulties in securing housing and employment, ostracization by other residents, harassment, and emotional problems for offenders’ families. What this research suggests, then, is that when community members learn that a sex offender lives in their neighborhood, they may become fearful and may harass, victimize, or discriminate against registered offenders. As a result, offenders may become increasingly isolated and frustrated, which could in turn lead to recidivism. (p. 68).

Harassment and other negative affects could be related to the aesthetics of both sex offender registries and community notification efforts, which attempt to achieve deterrence and incapacitation primarily through humiliation, isolation, and labeling. For example, the Oregon Sex Offender inquiry system allows users to find sexual predators using a map feature. The offenders are then listed by zip code, with graphic bubbles on a map indicating their residence. When a name is selected, a bubble appears with the word “Predator” in bright red, all capital letters followed a colon. The name of that particular offender follows. This labeling echoes the embroidered red “A” in “The Scarlet Letter,” and in fact, red is a powerful color choice for labeling – both because of its association with the infamous Hester Prynne and because it evokes “alert” and “emergency” and “anger.” The bold font and bright color immediately attract a reader’s eye and never once leave the field of vision while viewing the profile. By virtue of design, the label “predator” is the central and most important focus.

Users can select an offender from the list and view a photograph (usually a mug shot), full address, and the make and model of his/her automobile. Again, prominently displayed beneath the photograph is the word “Predator” in red, bold font, surrounded by asterisks or stars. A list of convictions and conviction dates follows personal information such as weight, height, scars, tattoos, etc. Beneath the list of convictions is a description of the offender’s MO. Interestingly, this is presented in the present tense. For example: “Mr. Crivaro gains access to victims through positions of trust … “

Collateral Consequences by Design?

If the sex offender registry system inflicts collateral consequences by design, what are the implications for our justice system? Should the criminal justice system inflict punishments “off the books?” What do you think?

References

Braithwaite, John. (1993). Shame and Modernity. In John Braithwaite (Ed.), Regulation, Crime, Freedom(pp. 267-281). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing.

Koss, Mary P., Karen J. Bachar, and C. Quince Hopkins. (2003). Restorative justice for sexual violence: repairing victims, building community, and holding offenders accountable. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 989, 384-396.

Oregon Sex Offender Inquiry System. (2006). Conditions of Use Statement. Retrieved October 15, 2006 from http://sexoffenders.oregon.gov

Presser, Lois and Elaine Gunnison. (1999). Strange bedfellows: is sex offender notification a form of community justice? Crime & Delinquency, 45(3), 299 – 315.

Tewskbury, Richard. (2005). Collateral consequences of sex offender registration. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 25(1), 67-81.

Zehr, Howard. (2002). The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Intercourse, PA: Good Books.